30. Impressions #4

The fourth of my autobiographical impressions…

To lighten the mood after that, I’ll add the warm up. When I sit at the typewriter, my mind is often completely blank, at least of anything worth relating. So, I just start typing any old thing, like a high jumper bends and stretches before launching into a run. Here I started with a skit on William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow…

Rob MacKillop

7 thoughts on “30. Impressions #4”

Did you ever learn if the child survived? That’s terrible to ponder. I once drove by a hamburger joint on my way home from college. (This was in Tallahassee.) There were police cars all over the place. I couldn’t make out what had happened. Later that day I had the television on. Apparently a toddler had shot himself while sitting in the back of his mother’s car. She was in the restaurant. Thankfully, the news that came later was that the bullet went straight through his torso without touching a single organ. He would be fine. It’s impossible to forget such experiences.

He shot himself in the stomach, yet survived? Wow. Was he lucky. I don’t think the kid in my story survived, not considering the state he was in, which I didn’t want to ponder on.

This is just a sketch. I hope one day to distil it into a poem. I just don’t feel my poetry can handle something like this right now. But I have to at least write it down like this while I remember it. I

I thought it was intentional. I enjoyed it. Every once in a while those big modernists like Eliot and Joyce got some reference wrong in their writing, but the force of the writing makes the mistake irrelevant.